He is 17. They've got him on the wing. He spent the first two games terrified of getting hit. Then something clicked. As I mentioned, he's new to organized sports, so he's still picking up some basics, like he is still easily juked, but heaven help you if you're within arms reach of him. If he can touch you, you're going down.

It is deeply satisfying watching him work. He's even gotten his hands on the ball a few times, and is able to power through two to three guys his own size just by growling through. It's amazing.

Ah wonderful - wing play is great. I played wing all through my high school years and was forced to play halfback once I hit University and the Samoan wingers that were built like fridges took up residence.

It sounds like he's a formidable attacker - as he gets used to the game he could try inserting himself into the backline at different moments. A powerful wing screaming in off his 10's shoulder is a seriously daunting task for a defender.

If you've played before you've probably already told him, but one piece of advice always stuck with me as a winger - "show them the touchline". When he's defending, rather than rush the attacker he can approach them from an angle that presents the touchline side as an 'out' for said attacker. They'll either try and run through him and find out the hard way that's not going to happen; or try and run around him falling right into his trap!

Sorry. I love that sport. Hearing about someone just getting into it gets me so damn excited.

I am dark purple. FKA Russia. While focused on betraying some of my immediate neighbors with the help of my distant neighbors, I was betrayed by the one I never suspected so soon. For my first WebDiplomacy game and especially against other members of Hubski I lasted way longer than I should have.

The personal implications of being defeated by Turks as an Armenian is another matter.

I honestly really, really hate that goat picture. I was doing so well drawing the actual goat and then I messed everything up by just rushing to try and fill in the background without putting any effort into it. Then I tried to fix it and in doing so, made it even worse. So now I have this really okay looking goat surrounded by a messy blob of color that just ruins the effort I put into it because I didn’t want to put effort into the rest of the picture. It’s a metaphor for life people, let the eyesore be a warning.

Thank you. I'm pretty happy with how the fox came out. Out of the three, I think the animal looks least like the source image, but out of the three it feels the most balanced. I have this weird compulsion where I think all of my drawings need backgrounds, because even though I can't draw realistically, I'm convinced that because there's a background to everything in real life, anything I draw is incomplete if they don't have one. Unfortunately, backgrounds are usually where I end up ruining a picture.

I tried to draw a mountainscape one time, and I think all I drew were three or four black lines on a single sheet of paper. Between you and me, I think extreme minimalism isn't really all that great art, but I looked at these lines I thought "If I literally do anything else to this, I know I'm gonna mess it up." So I drew an extremely minimalist piece, and I hate it because it looks halfway decent and all it took was about thirty seconds to make, so I feel like I cheated on it. I'll see if I can dig it out and share it on next week's Pubski if you'd like to see it.

And I don't have low Testosterone. I'm just a middle-aged dude with a vasectomy who is doing the Keto diet, and all three of these things lower your testosterone naturally.

So four months and maybe $2800 later, the result is, "Yep, you are pretty healthy for a fat middle-aged white dude. Get your glasses prescription updated, and use these eye drops a couple times a day while staring at the screen, and you'll be fine. Oh, and once you reach your goal weight, switch from Keto to a Paleo diet, so your body chemistry isn't constantly verging on hibernation mode."

It's a relief, and a let-down, and annoying. The entire medical industry (except for KB's birth center) can suck my left nut, and then go die in a fire.

I'd bank my cells with ForeverLabs if I ever thought these dinkus doctors could ever do anything productive with them.

Grrr.

And YAY I'm pretty dang healthy.

And ... now what?

Work

Still haven't looked at my resume, but I have tagged about 9 different jobs on Glassdoor that I am PERFECT for and will pay me somewhere between $20k - $40k more than I'm making now.

RIP, Extreme Makeover. As a shirt, you were perfect, and as a shirt, you will be missed.

(note upon posting: what follows here is a discussion which revolves around certain personal feelings I have which I choose, generally, not to discuss with many people and which I have not ever really delved into publicly on Hubski. these feelings are difficult to put into words. please respect me, and them. this is also, i acknowledge, an overly wordy exploration of them.)

Bought in 2005 for less than ten dollars, on post-Halloween clearance by my mother in a J. C. Penny's for me while I was "reading in the car," aka texting my first real boyfriend and, I remember clearly, having honestly one of many unpleasant little mental crisis-moments endemic to the fun and vicious control/self-loathing issues from which I suffered at the time, "Extreme Makeover" waltzed into my life, a love story on the sly. At first I was nonplussed. It's unusual for my mother to peg my style so completely, even to this day, so my first reaction to the shirt was lukewarm. It was unlikely to even be the right size, knowing her.

But "Extreme Makeover" turned out to be the perfect size, not only a medium (as was correct) but a comfortable medium, a loose medium that was not too loose, a shirt that I could wear when I felt fat but which was never so big that I felt it made me look fat. The skull combined with its quippy caption only became more amusing, more in line with my sense of humor, over the years. The shirt itself was black, which was essential if I was going to love it, and simple, which you can tell because after describing the fit, front decal, and background color I have nothing left to describe about "Extreme Makeover" at all. Which is hard for me, because for me, for years, this was The Perfect Shirt, and this is its' eulogy, and I want you to know why.

Wouldn't you think a Perfect Shirt would have a million awesome descriptive elements that a person loved about it?

I'm sure part of what made "Extreme Makeover" so perfect, for me, was its simplicity.

Forgive me as I segue into overly personal and revealing backstory.

I have difficulty with getting dressed. Or maybe I have difficulty with confidence, or maybe I have issues about appearance and presentation. I should stop trying to put this into words and instead put it into examples: sometimes, I've been known to get dressed in a comfortable, cute outfit to go out to the bar with my friends, drive 45 minutes to the bar, get out of the car, and walk past the first reflective storefront mirror-window on the way to the bar. By that point I will "realize" ('determine' is probably more accurate) that my outfit is terrible, it will attract too much attention, I feel uncomfortable in it, I cannot go out like this, and my full-body reflection in the glass windows will only serve as evidence towards this. Sometimes I walk up and down a block or two of sidewalk, determined to meet my friends now anyway, then turning around as I change my mind. Sometimes I do this a few times. Sometimes I get in my car, drive home, and change. Sometimes I make it to the bar and fret about what I am wearing, constantly.

For more context: I live and bar in a college town, where I am surrounded by lithe carefree late-teens-and-twenty-something ladies who I see on Main Street sporting literally every possible combination or lack of combination of outre, on-trend, revealing, attention-grabbing apparel which you could ever imagine. Realistically, this is an environment which, if I could base my comfort level rationally on my clothing-surroundings, I should feel able to wear anything. For more, more context: Items which have caused such a crisis as I've described above include, for instance, a pair of denim short shorts. A black sundress. A retro blue-and-green-swirled dress which went to the knee and had sequins on it (the sequins contributed to the dilemma). A pair of 3-in wedge heels. What I am trying to say is that I understand everyone, to some degree, may relate to the feelings of mine I describe; however, for me, these feelings seem to come more frequently, influence my mood more severely, and generally unduly able to disturb my intentions compared to the 'norm.' Whatever that is.

Call it what you want: I have difficulty getting dressed. (You should hear the "professional officewear" side of this conversation!)

As such, over time, I've discovered there are certain pieces of clothing which can save my mental life. I call them "safe" clothes. They're pieces which, no matter what, I can throw on, go out in public, and feel comfortable. They must, of course, also confirm to my aesthete; I'm sure it's a combination of "I agree with the vibe this shirt is putting out" as well as "I never have to question how I feel I look in this shirt" which leads to these perennial, and mental-life-saving, favorite "comfort clothes." I need such pieces, or there would be days I would not go out in public because of how I felt about myself and how I looked in all the rest of my perfectly normal, perfectly-fine-fitting clothing.

"Extreme Makeover" was the first such piece of safe clothing, for me. It was a safe shirt for years before I realized that's what it was; before I realized the concept of "safe shirts" and before I began consciously trying to make sure I always had a small collection of them in my wardrobe; before I began to identify their hallmarks and seek them out.

It is no surprise "Extreme Makeover" has thrown in its proverbial towel; what is more of a surprise is how well it's held up to the frequent wear for the past 13 years. I remember reaching for this shirt constantly. I remember how "Extreme Makeover" resolved every single put-on-every-single-shirt-you-own-and-hate-the-way-you-look-in-all-of-them session as soon as I saw it, grabbed it, pulled it on. Really, each time it was a sigh of relief.

This shirt represents mental security to me in a very real and (I suspect) deeper-than-the-norm way.

Thank you, "Extreme Makeover." Sometimes idiots thought you were a Punisher T, and I suspect lots of times people didn't properly get what you were about.

Today I held you up to the light and I could see straight through you. You'd gotten so old your decal was wearing into holes. Your letters have been discolored for a long time. I knew this day was coming. And I have other safe shirts now, other shirts I can trust the way I learned I could trust you. Implicitly. Forever.

To make a long story short, when I was book-binding I started using old material as covers and that included old t-shirts (disposable non-favorites). When I finally had to admit my first permanently-great shirt was at death's door this summer (like, it was irresponsible to wash it), that was my first idea for preservation. but the graphic was way too big, for various reasons it just wouldn't work.

One night I got drunk and was going through art supplies and thinking about the shirt and I saw a lid to one of those stiff fabric-covered "decorative" storage boxes you can get at like, Target and shit. And it was the perfect size for this shirt's graphic, which was admittedly large enough that my only other idea before this had been that "you know, i've read about people making t-shirt quilts and stuff, before," an idea which was promptly shut down because fuck no i'm not learning quilting to preserve my favorite t-shirts. i have to draw the line somewhere.

so i had practice keeping material like reasonably taut and even from book covers and i grabbed a hot glue gun and just went at it. i did 2 that way

(no i don't really advise this because it does complicate/limit the use of your storage boxes later, a realization which i almost regret, but i have lots of boxes)

And then, laugh at me for this, i ghetto-fabulous-DIY-i-ain't-need-to-spend-money-on-this-even-though-it's-deeply-meaningful'd the next 2, of which "Extreme Makeover" is the second.

i just found shipping boxes that were the right size and i cut down the sides of them so i had decent frame-like structures and i hot glued right onto that

(i have finessed the technique with "Extreme Makeover" and honestly, it's the best looking 'job' of the set)

- comme ci comme ca 's superpower : if i was wearing this in a photo i invariably actually liked the photo. once upon a time i left come ci comme ca at a boy's house after hooking up with him. i kept forgetting to get it back and then one week i found out he slept with a friend of mine who'd known how i felt about him. damn it, i thought, that was such a great shirt. i stopped talking to both. the 'friend', who was unmedicated and is nuts, was desperate to get me to talk to her/conceivably forgive her for her choice. she offered to do anything to get us to talk and "move past this." OK i said get the shirt. and, crazy is as crazy does, but when crazy thinks it can get you to welcome it back with open arms crazy can actually bother a typical oblivious sweatydude into finding some ex's shirt in his messy of a room and getting it from him.

so i got the shirt back. and the crazy girl and i met up at our bar and talked, and when she realized she wasn't magically getting her way and no, i wasn't going to buy her line about "i felt closed out from your life so i slept with him, soo now what we need to fix this is for you to tell me more of your private secrets and feelings!" -- she threatened to pour a beer on some other poor girl's head and getting in between the two of them is the closest thing i've ever gotten to being in a real fight. and i was just getting between them til the bouncer came over (because i was pretty confident she knew if she poured the beer on ME, she was going to have no future chance in my life, at all).

what a story, right? you see why i had to keep that shirt.

- the baretta 92 fs. once in a tiny townhouse in fishtown, philadelphia, hanging out with a beautiful boy and his roommate, i dropped a joint and burned that hole. another time i wore this to a 4th of july party with american flag acid wash shorts. at the end of the party (the end of it for me anyway) i got quite drunk quite quickly on shots of tito's vodka and then accused a partygoer of being sexist. he saw me leaving with a female friend, and my brother, and stopped us to tell me that i wasn't driving. (nope not a question.) i said yea i mean, that sounds good to me. there's three of us. he turned to my brother, who i'd just done shots in the kitchen with, to reiterate his point. and i was drunk and it made me mad he was being so bossy (i wasn't even trying to drive out of there), and it made twice as mad he was trying to put my also-drunk brother in charge, and 3x as mad because my perfectly sober female friend was just standing there getting ignored! and my brother didn't even have a goddamn legal license at that point!

so i called him sexist but i think my point got a little lost beneath the tito's. hey i stand by what i said. and am happy when i'm drunk to walk or give up my keys.

-this shirt is complicated, but my oldest. if i could figure out how to edit everyone else from sophomore year of high school out of the photo, i would share a precious shot of me in braces wearing it

I'm not sure if the problem is that Windows isn't on the first drive in the machine, 'cause that's what I plopped OBSD on. Did windows place it's EFI info that drive? There was already a partition there for it to use. A leftover from the prior linux install.

Or maybe I just don't understand how EFI works?

I miss the days of installing stuff on PowerPC based Macs. Sure the hardware support was kinda flakey, and there were no binarys for flash, but it was a limited ecosystem that I know inside and out.

I just want to play overwatch and have a decent OS to use. Now I've gotta flash a windows installer to usb and recover shit.

Bologna.

Update on Item 5:

So far, kinda a meh book. Might have been more interesting if I hadn't just read Zinn, and also read pieces of Legacy of Ashes a while back. Lots of overlap between those thus far.

Because reasons I tracked this down yesterday and turns out this post is exactly one year old today:

I just spent too much effort on a weird garden path rant after learning what incel is. Anyway. I should have posted about this first.

I maybe am more open with you strangers than most would be given my problems. I was gone last week. My step dad sent me to the crisis unit because I showed up drunk to his house. He lost his shit when I came back after discharge to get my car and said some very hurtful things I'd rather not think about right now.

That link is to a telling of my life up to that point when I was very hopeful. It's a half hour long. And long story short, everything that was giving my hope at that time fell apart spectacularly in a way that I didn't think I could recover from or survive.

But here I am. Technically but not legally homeless because the definition is ridiculous here. Grinding it. Selling free used books. Writing. Avoiding trespassing charges by buying things I can't afford or parking where it's unlikely a cop will find me asleep at 2AM. Accepting charity from my mother and ignoring the guilt. Being frighteningly energetic after 29 hours being awake out of necessity, fear and bipolar mania. Motivating myself for a time to spite people by succeeding but knowing that isn't sustainable. And not really complaining because I was raised not to. And maintaining my political progressive optimism that people are good, government can work, wanting to make a career of that and not being bitter despite all the justifiable reasons I could be. A little bitter about some things. Fuck certain people for good reasons.

As soon as today I will have an apartment through the local mental health agency that's been helping me. I got kicked out of sober living a month ago but that means I can be friends with the owner who is younger than me and a great guy and I'm slowly meeting other sober people who are good people.

I'm pretty OK.

_____

Little aside: people younger than I, don't follow your heart. I think people still say that but the world has changed in only 20 years and young people are maybe a little more pragmatic today. I was always somewhat aware of the underlying, unspoken unhappiness in my family. I was the oldest. I was the test case and I remember more of an early, unhealthy marriage with inexperienced parents.

After high school I semi consciously decided I wanted to be happy, that money was unimportant despite living towards the lower and of middle class when I was a kid. I majored in art, dropped out of school for a girl in another state who dumped me right away. I lost a full scholarship and a great internship. I re enrolled in college and chose an even less practical art major.

That's just 17-20 year old decision making of a person who wanted to be happy but had no idea how to do it. I've been arrested four times. I've tried to sleep on the grass in February. I have never had anything close to a career. A lot of that is entirely my fault. Some is unfortunate circumstance and the hand I was dealt. Some of my role is being naive which I suppose is excusable.

The median age of hubski is pretty high. I don't know who I'm directing this at. But if you follow your heart and try to do what you love, love what you do and get paid or whatever platitude I bought into at one point. It's going to be hard, risky, you might fail, you might end up with the opposite of what you want and you might end up places you didn't expect and maybe weren't supposed to go.

I suppose at the moment I am content with a suitcase in an airbnb, a computer that's too old for what I will end up paying for it and almost everything I own jammed in a closet for a while. I have some people who seem to care about me who I didn't know eight months ago. Contentment is a goal perfectly attuned to reality and happiness is just something you get occasionally when you're lucky.

Today is insane. I'm a bundle of nerves about how little I've reviewed for my comprehensive finals that I'm marathoning starting tomorrow through Saturday.

But. I also got to get a load off my chest by picking up the phone and chatting with my parents - surprisingly effective. Had some REAL shit come up after unloading my nerves, stresses, worries, etc. Hoping to revisit it after exams with my parents, some friends, and myself before making a cogent thread on here to discuss the topic of

drumroll please

Relationships, intimacy, and their roles with eachother.

EDIT: BUT WAIT, THERES MORE

As always (I'm human), this comes up a lot. The lady friend I've been meeting up with near weekly for a few months now is very open when it comes to speaking about her relationships and intimacy. Its refreshing to be open in an appropriate manner (with both party's (spelling?) boundaries being respected). Its given me space to seriously take a look at my own past romantic relationships.... And how fucked up some of my firsts were. In light of this, I'm looking forward to getting more information from my discussions after exams so I can break the cycle of my past relationships and improve my future ones. All-in-all, I feel really lucky to have this lady friend in my life who's held the space for me.

It’s now been almost 3 months since I started working! On the one hand, I feel like I have found my place among my peers; I know what I can and can’t tackle, I’m loving the various projects I’m working on, and I’m actively pushing the data team forward by building a Python/PostGIS work environment for our models. My added value is in innovation and structurizing, and there’s visible progress in both.

On the other hand I am thinking about more longer-term goals, about what I want to get out of it. I like to think ahead as far as I think is reasonable, which is always at least a few months. A difference between me and my coworkers is that most of them have a more clearly defined added value; if you want to do X, get Y to tag along. Don’t know what that is for me yet. Currently I love working on lots of wildly different projects; for example, tomorrow I will start on a project to figure out potential locations for developing small-scale housing on unused plots in bad neighborhood. Yesterday I was working on figuring out how to process data on 3.5 million business. The day before I looked highly detailed and privacy-sensitive demographic data. I like the variation, but I also want to have a more clearly defined place to call my own.

Another thing I want to reconsider is how busy I want to be. Someone once said that work should be a jog in the park with well-timed sprints. The first few weeks were not much more than a walk; the second month was a full sprint, and now I’m back to a modest jog. There’s a balance between being challenged enough and having enough freedom/agency that I don’t think I’ve found yet.

I think next week I'm halfway through the first quarter. It's weird: in the morning, I'm in a CNC shop with a giant Kinder Morgan banner in the corner. In the afternoon I'm at a bizarre community college art school where every week brings a new hectoring public awareness campaign informing me that I'm a rapist and a murderer because I'm a straight white male.

I get it: if you're a GBLT teen chances are you've been harassed at some point in your life. But get this: there are few more welcoming places than an art school community college in North Seattle and when you get out into the world, those Kinder Morgan guys haven't seen your awareness campaign. And those of us in the middle are weary of being told we're the problem by both sides.

I'm doing what I can to bridge the gap. My first jewelry project was an IATSE symbol rendered in nickel silver. My second is a broach comprised of an engine-turned pen, a Starrett 795-XFL2 digital caliper and an ETA2824 (it's supposed to be a "self-portrait"). Our silver solder exercise was supposed to be a tube to a plate, a pin back, and a brazed wire to a plate. I got carried away and made a KH-11.

My project watch has now been apart and together four times. It's been through three mainsprings. I got it back together and ticking last night and the sound and silence washed over me like a warm, purifying rain. It does not yet tell time accurately. But it will. That was in doubt last week.

Tuesdays are hard. I start at 7am then drive 15 miles at noon and work until 4pm. Then I pick up the kid make dinner and leave at 6 to work on watches until 9:30. Minus two hours for meals and driving I'm going solid from 6am until 9:30pm.

But they're not as hard as Mondays and Wednesdays because I hate my art teacher SO MUCH. I realized Monday that I have an easier time listening to her if I imagine the Hypnotoad blasting in the background.

Unfortunately nobody sells hypnotoad patches. I would put this on my bag so quick.

Sometimes with particularly aggravating coworkers I tell myself, “maybe they are on pain medication.” No reason for it, other than the seeming stupidity, density and aggravation.

Surprisingly, though, I find it helps to imagine my coworkers are idiots because they’re illicitly drugged to the gills and I just don’t realize it - as opposed to believing that no, sober, they are just like this.

I say try it with Prof Hypnotoad, why not? It can’t hurt either way any way. Maybe she IS on massive amounts of drugs. Who are any of us to know any better, anyway?

I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep so now I’m out $150 but match.com is gonna find me the love of my life , so... I’m gonna try to get some more sleep before my 10 am meeting.

She's totally on pain medication. I can give you her life story - she's an oversharer. She went to school in Seattle then moved out to NYC to be bohemian. She ended up dating a guy who ran a letterpress and sold one of her expressionist pencil drawings to "the most important collector of sketches in the world." While there, "her work was reviewed in the New York Times." Then she came down with "an illness that messes with my balance and fine motor control", got dumped by her boyfriend and came back to teach at community college. Sucks, I know.

But that doesn't mean she doesn't have to interrogate me as to why I'm drawing feint lines with one pencil and then going over them in another only to say "that's okay, we'll deprogram you" and then command the entire class to do exactly that the next day. Doesn't mean she needs to unload on some poor 50-year-old Japanese divorcee for not understanding by clapping her hands and announcing "now listen I was reviewed in the New York Times and you're all lucky to have me so when I say listen, LISTEN!" Doesn't mean she has a reason to give us all life lessons for half an hour before we can start. Doesn't mean she can put stuff out for us to draw, then move it all fifteen minutes later because she's decided "the light is better this way."

I can feel sorry for her. But I can also acknowledge she doesn't need to be such a bitch.

I just find it hard to work with people the way I need to when I'm also like "you're a fucking bitch," you know? So it helps me to imagine it's incompetence. or drugs.

like, it is very hard for me to be nice to people if i believe they are deliberately being, shall we say, "fuckin' idiots." and at work, i gotta be nice. and i gotta convince these people to work with me, day in and day out.

hence the pain medication

but i bitch about 'em to other people all i like, of course

i resonate deeply with some lines of kanye west's hit single "runaway"

like i mean in a patronizing tone of voice so that he could explain it to me

i said " uh - uh - st- we - uh - well - yes, you know, i'm always willing to hear another perspective and learn whether we have the same idea about things, yes, so i'd love to hear more if you are offering it"

i've been on depression meds / mood stabilizers for roughly two months, anti-androgens for roughly a month and a half, and estrogen for roughly a month, and i'm pleased to report that all of these things have helped quite a bit actually

never let anybody tell you not to medicate, and if you can grab an opportunity, grab it really quick

in other news i'm going to state this fall

i haven't felt this good, in a real, genuine way, in a really long time, and i have hope and lots of good reasons to think that things are going to keep getting better

Absolutely gorgeous. And I can really give two shits about football these days, but tailgate season at Michigan State is really something to be experienced. At the very least it gives you an alternative path to the freshman fifteen from the cafeterias.

Have huge swings in expenses a few months before summer job income. Not a massive differential, but it involves borrowing some money from dear sis. The stress from meeting my (quite low) expenses prompted me to make a granular monthly budget for the next 14 months, which got me wondering about what it's like to budget when you have a grown-up's income.

What can hubskiers report about maximizing income, minimizing expenses, and saving? Any needless suffering that can be avoided?

“Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.”

- Dorothy Parker

Everyone under the sun can give you advice on budgeting. Everyone has a system, and it will or won't work for you. Budgeting is like dieting, though - it's an exercise of self-denial and when ego depletion hits you'll blow it all.

There's a scene in It Could Happen to You in which Bridget Fonda has lost it all to her scheming ex-husband but what really hurts is the macadamia nuts. An obvious frivolity, a luxury beyond compare, giving up the macadamia nuts is more than the straw that breaks the camel's back, it's the thing that kills her psyche. It's the one last bit of surplus good that gets purged.

Any budgeter worth their salt will tell you to purge your recurrents - the daily espresso, the Netflix, the PSPlus. This is why budgeters are all shitheads. There's a real Lutheran drive amongst money people to crush all the fun so that you can go fuck yeah budgeting and feel more fiscally responsible than the next guy, and that's why they should all be lined up and shot.

Take a long, thoughtful look around your place. Note the stuff that matters to you, and the stuff that doesn't. Go through your day and analyze "this matters to me" and "this doesn't." You may discover that the high point of your morning is artisanal toast with Kerrygold butter. You may discover that you're totally cool walking rather than riding the bus. You might decide your clothes are irrelevant to you but your shoes really matter.

Smells matter to me. I buy a $5 bar of soap every three or four weeks, and my shampoo is Aveda. Even when money was tight, our shampoo was Aveda because, in my wife's words, "from a daily expense standpoint it isn't much and hair matters." We're doing pretty well now and I offered to upgrade her car - and she's 100% cool with an '09 fit with 150k miles on it because she gives no fucks about cars.

Decide what makes you feel like you and defend those things with your life. The things that don't matter, go ahead and neglect them. You can buy new jeans when your phone falls through your back pocket.

Obviously this fucks with the idea of a "granular monthly budget" but I have not had regularly scheduled income for eleven years now and I do fine. Live within your means, save when you're poor, reward yourself when you're not. Anticipation is powerful: you don't need to buy that new computer to enjoy it. You can plan to buy it for months and then when it's time, it's equally satisfying.

The one good financial rule I've never heard from anyone but intermittent income folx is "do not buy depreciating assets on credit." Buy the car you can afford to pay cash for. Do not put clothse on credit. Etc.

budgets are a must in my book. The beauty is - if you always keep your budget (within reason) aligned to your PREVIOUS paycheck amounts, you're in the black. Obviously as life changes, you need to adjust it up (marriage, kids, housing, car, etc) but seriously - being mindful about where you spend your money is a key to financial success. I'm excited for your budget. It will serve you well.

I have tracked nearly every expense since July 2014, and written out a budget for about 6-month periods since around the same time. (Keeping within that budget is another beast--I always seem to underestimate my spending by about 10-20%...) The reason for the short budgetary periods is that between traveling, service work, and atypical job lengths, I didn't have anything even approaching a regular schedule of income and expenses. That's changed somewhat, and the situation promises to be much more regular if I take a corporate job after I graduate.

But yea, knowing what you spend your money on is a huge first step that a lot of people don't even take. I know people who brag about never looking at their checking account.

Having just made the transition to a new home and a grown-up’s budget...I have barely changed my habits or expenses. Mostly because my budgeting style is effectively what kb is arguing for, although I had never thought of it that way. Once in a blue moon I take a look at the recurring payments and cull whatever doesn’t bring me joy à la Marie Kondo. My approach to buying stuff is one I took from Adam Savage: when you first buy something, buy the cheapest, because you don’t know if you will use it often yet. When that breaks, buy the best there is (or the one that makes you the most happy).

Basically, my approach to budgeting is to make it invisible. The only thing I care about is that I don’t have to worry about money: that I can pay all my expenses and have enough wiggle room to buy things that make me happy. So I make sure that I never have less than one month of expenses in my checkings account, while also moving money to my savings regularly, because if I see a large number on my checkings account I get the irresistible urge to buy shit I don’t need.

We use Mint for tracking expenses. This weekend we are opening up a joint checking/savings for Bill pay and the rainy day fund which has been living in my firesafe in the closet for the last few months.

Budgeting is easier when you don't have massive unplanned expenses every few months or a truly unthinkably large expense in the near future. Responsible money management for me at the moment is just not making impulsive purchases.

Once I finished school and got a better job I put everything I could on autopay and kept that checking account about double the typical monthly costs. That way I don't have to worry about being late on anything.

As far as budgeting, we are lazier than we should be. We keep track afterwards, but don't have any pre-allocated budget categories and we don't save specifically for big infrequent costs and just keep a bigger emergency fund.

Started a new job and I had to A) learn this job during the handover process, B) hand over my old job in the same handover process and C) Learn what I may need to do once the organization finishes it's restructuring.

HR is so far backlogged with work that I started this job last week, they were aware of the change the month prior, and I only just got my contract today. I very nearly threw the whole thing in for another job, that's how long it was taking to generate some paperwork.

On the plus side, the new job is cool and full of very friendly people.

My partner is off getting her wisdom teeth removed (her dentist is in another city, made sense for him to do the job) - this is the first time we've been in separate beds all year. I tried to starfish but wound up sleeping on my side anyway, cute.

Was ANZAC day here on the 25th. To me it's about rememberance, and mourning the massive loss of life. Not so much thanking the soliders, but apologizing for sending them away in the first place. The service in my city is normally very sombre, and I hope it continues - to show the coming generations that ANZAC day is about mourning the tragic event.